941 - Guenter Deeken, Vietnamese Child with Richard Nixon, Pop Art against Vietnam War, 1974

Guenter Deeken, Vietnamese Child with Richard Nixon, Pop Art against Vietnam War, 1974 Oil and lacquer/painting panel, unsigned. Inscribed and dated 1974 on a slip of paper on the reverse, inscribed 'VIETNAMESISCHES KIND DEEKEN /74' on a label on the front of the frame. In the foreground the far thrown back, screaming head of a child with blue flesh tones, dressed in a black and white striped garment; behind it the likewise screaming head of Richard Nixon in a dark suit with pink flesh tones. At the left a Coca-Cola bottle and a flag of the United States, in front of them a rat and a comic figure with a sabre, above a jet aircraft bearing the insignia of the US armed forces from which bombs are falling; the ground laid in flaming green, orange and red. The colours applied in clear, poster-like areas with hard contours. Age-appropriate condition, scratches with loss of paint. Image 96 x 67.5 cm (HxW), framed, frame bumped, frame width 2.5 cm. The Vietnam War was the defining political subject of Western European art between 1965 and 1975. The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 ended American involvement, but fighting in Vietnam continued until the fall of Saigon in April 1975 – 1974, the year this picture was made, falls precisely within that phase. Characteristic of the political imagery of the time is the combination of Pop Art vocabulary with motifs of accusation: trademarks and comic figures of American consumer culture are brought together with weaponry and depictions of victims in order to make the connection between the world of goods and the war visible. Comparable works were produced in the milieu of the German student movement and the poster-like protest graphics of those years. The inclusion of Richard Nixon fits the year of creation exactly: the American president, who had inherited the war in 1969 and ended it with the Paris Accords of 1973, resigned on 9 August 1974 as a result of the Watergate affair.